I’m writing this week’s “Mad Men” recap without benefit of having read anyone else’s recaps, save for the Wall Street Journal’s first entry in its conversation, by Walter Dellinger, which hit the web site around 11:30 p.m. after “To Have and To Hold” aired on the East Coast.
I knew it was a good episode from my Twitter stream. (Reminder: I usually follow the tweets in real time when the episode airs on Sunday evenings, then watch the episode the next morning on Amazon.) The response on Twitter was highly favorable, basically applause with words. After the show, one person I follow on Twitter, and whose opinion on “Mad Men” I very much respect, called it possibly his all-time favorite. It’s also one of mine. Thank goodness. I was beginning to think the show had veered off-track.
What uprighted “Mad Men” for this recapstress? The pacing, for one thing. Episode one was lugubrious, episode two choppy. This week’s even and smooth, a feat considering the number of settings. The writers anchored the storyline between Sterling Cooper Draper and Pryce and Don and Megan’s, but dipped into multiple settings, including Pete’s apartment; Joan’s apartment; a coffee counter, where Dawn, Don’s secretary, meets a friend; Megan’s television studio; a restaurant with phones at the table; the Electric Circus, where Joan and a childhood friend go; a restaurant, where Don and Megan have dinner with Megan’s colleagues who are also swingers; a room at the Roosevelt, where Don presents his Project K Heinz ketchup pitch, thinking they’re the only firm in town up for the gig, only to see Peggy and Ted outside, ready with a pitch of their own. This sounds frenetic, all these secondary settings, but the show achieved a satisfying flow.
There was plenty of male-female conflict in “To Have and To Hold.” Harry took on Joan for firing his secretary Scarlett for an infraction involving time cards. (Dawn punched her out, so Scarlett was clocking hours when she wasn’t working.) Harry prevailed and Scarlett, who may or may not have something going on with Harry, stayed. Harry used the occasion to burst into a partner’s meeting and make an appeal for a partnership.
Don and Megan tussled over Megan’s kissing scene in her soap opera, which culminated in Don making his first visit to the set. (More on this below.) As for Peggy and Stan, ouch. Stan flipped the bird at Peggy in dismay over Peggy’s running with the information that CSDP was pitching Heinz ketchup, which Stan had shared in one of their wonderful end-of-the-day phone calls. (Whether this means the end to their friendship, and those wonderful end-of-the-workday phone calls, remains to be seen.)
Harry and Joan’s encounter illuminated disparate career frustrations. Harry feels undervalued, and, as head of television, has a point since he brings so much business to the firm. But the manner in which he handled himself, denigrating Joan in the partners’ meeting, explicitly stating that he would be judged based on what he did during the day, a clear reference to Joan’s tryst that helped the firm seal the Jaguar account, removed any dignity to his claims. He didn’t get his partnership, but he did get a commission for his Broadway Joe on Broadway idea, a show that Procter and Gamble would sponsor to counter the bad publicity over napalm, a product that’s making the headlines with the war in Vietnam.
Joan, on the other hand, manages the friction with grace and aplomb. She defers to Scarlett when Harry challenges the firing, and doesn’t lose it when Harry humiliates her in the partner meetings. Their hornlocking recalled season two’s “A Night to Remember,” when Harry asked Joan to help him read TV scripts ahead of air time. Joan enjoyed the work, and was good at it. If someone with power, like Don, had recognized that, she might have been plucked out of her administrative functions and put to good use in a more creative capacity. Alas, that was not meant to be. She’s an executive, a partner no less, but, as she sighed to her childhood friend Kate in Sunday’s episode, she’s been working at the firm for 15 years and they still treat her like a secretary. Sort of sad, that moment.
This was a subdued but intense episode for Don. Megan’s been asked to do a kissing scene in her soap. Concerned about how Don might react, she prepares coq au vin and plans to tell him over dinner. Don senses something’s up. When she tells him, he ultimately tells her he can tolerate it but can’t encourage it. Here. it’s hard to tell if he means it, or if he’s playing the part of the possessive husband. It’s easy to cry “hypocrite,” since he’s sleeping with Sylvia, and many people did, but his initial response seems detached and manufactured.
Later, after he doesn’t get the Heinz ketchup account, he goes to visit Megan on the set, and watches the scene with a bewigged Megan in a maid’s outfit resisting and then surrendering to her co-actor’s passes. Don isn’t pleased, and here his upset seems genuine rather than mustered, and he has an absolutely nasty exchange with Megan in her dressing room that leaves Megan in tears.
Moments like this test the audience’s willingness to accept Don as a character. I do, and found this episode to be one of the most intensely provocative ones, colossal hypocrisy notwithstanding. Don then goes to Sylvia’s. She’s agreed to leave a penny under the doormat if her husband’s not home. In what has to be one of the most touching Don Draper scenes with any of his mistresses, Don asks Sylvia to remove the cross she wears. She doesn’t, and he asks her what she does with it. “I pray for you,” she tells him. He doesn’t catch the depth of this, and flirts back. “For me to come back?” he asks. “No. For you to find peace.” The look on Don’s face … If the audience is losing patience with Don’s behavior, this might restore their sense of empathy for this flawed, damaged soul.
What to watch for: Dawn’s role seem to be growing. We see her meeting with a friend. She also has new authority, with Joan making her in charge of timecards.
Might CSDL merge with Ted Chaough’s firm? The scene at the bar, when they talked about being the two smallest firms after they lost out on the Heinz account, was a hint at that.
Don and Sylvia: I wonder if she’s stepping out on Don. Losing Sylvia that way, Sylvia being unattainable, versus Megan or Arnie catching the two of them, would be interest. Here’s to the next one!
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